Work at a college around a bunch of teens and twenty-somethings long enough, and you will begin to ask yourself some questions. “How can anyone wear flip-flops in December?” is one. “They actually call that music?” is another. And then there is the biggie:

“Was I really that stupid when I was their age?”

The answer, of course, is yes. Absolutely.

For instance. When I was twenty, I believed:

That life was simple.

That the future was set in stone.

That love was all I needed.

That there is good and there is bad and there is nothing else.

That faith would make everything better.

That the young had more to offer than the old.

That the new held more promise than the tried and true.

Twenty-two years have passed since then. Twenty-two very long, very frantic, and at times very painful years. Whichever of the above beliefs were not proven ill-conceived through marriage and children have certainly been proven so through experience. I know better now. Much, much better.

For instance.

I know that life is not simple. It is hard and scary and tiresome, but it is not simple. If you think it is, then you’re not really living it.

I know that the future may well be set in God’s eyes, but it certainly isn’t in mine. What happens tomorrow is most often a direct result of what I do today, which is most often a direct result of what I did yesterday. The choices I make this day, this second, reach further and deeper than I can possibly realize. Every moment is a defining moment. Every moment is a moment of truth.

I know that love is not all I need. I know that without such things as grace and forgiveness and effort love will crumble upon itself. Love is not the all-powerful cure that poets and dreamers have crafted it to be. It must be nurtured and fed and tended to. Love is not a firm rock that can withstand anything. It is a delicate rose that can wither without attention.

I know that there is good and bad. But I also know that there is more, and I need to look no further than my own heart for proof. For there resides the good man I could be, the flawed man that I am, and the man who must choose daily which he will become.

I know that faith alone is feeble, that only when it is polished with action does it truly shine. Too many times I have prayed for things to get better but did nothing to make them so. God may move mountains, but that’s because mountains can’t move themselves.

I know that the vigor and strength of youth may power society, but it’s experience that drives it. Life has rules, and unfortunately they are not given all at once, but bit by bit as we go. That’s why parents and grandparents are so important. They’ve been there. And because they have, they know a lot more than we do. Time changes. The times do not.

And lastly, I know the new may be exciting, may be revolutionary, may even be promising, but I also know they may not be that way for long. The very things that have sustained us in the past are the things that guarantee us a bright future, things like the importance of family and God, things like the virtues of kindness and loyalty and forgiveness. Such things are woven into us. They are the foundation of who we are and who we will become.

That’s what I know now. Will those beliefs change? Maybe. Check back in twenty years and I’ll let you know.

image courtesy of google images. Spangled Blengins, Boy King Islands. One is a young Tuskorhorian, the other a human headed Dortherean by Henry Darger

Let me tell you about Henry Darger, the man who wrote one of the most detailed and bizarre books in history.

Never heard of him? Me neither. At least, not until I happened to stumble upon his story a few weeks ago. Seems strange that someone who did something so grand could be so unknown, doesn’t it? But it’s true. In fact, you could even say that’s why Henry was so extraordinary.

image courtesy of google images

He was a janitor. Nothing so special about that, but nothing so wrong with it, either. There is no correlation between who a person is and what that person does for a living. Einstein was a patent clerk. Faulkner a mailman. Henry Darger mopped floors.

An unassuming man. A quiet man. He never married, never really had friends. Just a regular guy living a regular life, one of the faceless masses that occupy so much of the world who are here for a short while and then gone forever.

Henry left in 1973.

There are no accounts of his funeral. I don’t know if anyone attended at all, though I like to think they did. I like to think there was a crowd huddled around his casket that day to bid him farewell.

It is an unfortunate fact of life that so many people are discovered to have been truly extraordinary only after their passing. Such was the case with Henry. A few days after his passing, his landlord went through his apartment to ready it for rent. What he found was astonishing.

What he found hidden among Henry’s possessions was a manuscript. Its title may give you a clue as to the story’s scope and magnitude:

THE STORY OF THE VIVIAN GIRLS, IN WHAT IS KNOWN AS THE REALMS OF THE UNREAL, OF THE GLANDECO-ANGELINIAN WAR STORM, CAUSED BY THE CHILD SLAVE REBELLION

Did you get that? If not, I can’t blame you. I had to read the title three times to even understand a little of it, and that doesn’t count the time I actually wrote it out.

The breadth and scope of Henry’s book went well beyond epic. The manuscript itself contained 15,000 pages. Over nine million words. Over 300 watercolor pictures coinciding with the story. Some of the illustrations were so large they measured ten feet wide.

A lifetime’s worth of work. Years upon years of solitary effort, hundreds of thousands of hours spent writing and painting, creating an entire saga of another world.

And all for no apparent reason. Not only did Henry Darger never seek any sort of publication for his work, he never told a soul about it. His book was his dream and his secret alone.

I’ve thought about Henry Darger a lot since I first read about him. Which, as change or fate would have it, just to happened to be the very week my newest novel released. A tough thing, that. You’d think it wouldn’t be, perhaps, but it is. No matter who an author is or how successful he or she may be or how many books or under his or her belt, the most important thing to us all is that our words matter. Matter to others, matter to the world. We want what we say and think and feel to count for something.

But Henry Darger reminds me that none of those things mean anything. In the end, we cannot account for how the world will judge our work, and so, in the end, the world’s opinion really doesn’t matter. Simple as that.

What matters—what counts—is that our words stir not the world, but ourselves. That they conjure in our own hearts and minds a kind of magic that neither the years nor the work can dull. The kind of magic that sustains us in our lonely times and gives our own private worlds meaning. The kind of magic that tinges even the life of a simple janitor with greatness.

Dorothea will tell you she and John would have been married 47 years come June. That’s how she always puts it—“would have been” instead of “will be”—past tense instead of future, even though John is still alive and they are still married. They still live in the same brick house two blocks from the Food Lion; are still seen driving the same gray sedan, though these days it is Dorothea driving John. He still gets around, she’ll tell you that as well. She’ll say her husband still reads the Richmond paper each morning and still takes his coffee strong and black and that both are absolute. What is not absolute, and in fact what Dorothea now questions every day of her life, is where her husband has gone, and who has taken his place.

They have four children, each of whom are grown and two of whom have moved away. Ten grandchildren, four great-grandchildren. The entire family gathers twice a year at the old home—every Christmas and Fourth of July. Those are festive times. Dorothea says there must be some special magic when the whole family is together, something about the sound of conversation and giggling children, that makes her husband feel like her husband again.

Those other 363 days can often be long. Sometimes they can be frightening, such as the afternoon last November when John went to check the mail and never returned. Dorothea found him three blocks and fifteen minutes later, sitting in the middle of the road, his bathrobe open and tossed by the breeze.

It began sudden, a year ago now, the same way so much bad in the world begins—with something small and ordinary. John had a history of migraines, and while the headaches that had plagued him for weeks were neither strong nor lasting enough to be called those, they were enough of a nuisance that Dorothea scheduled a doctor’s appointment. Tests were done. The doctor called them both back into his office three days later with the news. There was a tumor on John’s brain. It was inoperable.

The doctor said three months, six at the most. John’s outlasted both of those predictions. He always was a tough man, Dorothea will tell you. That’s how she’ll put it—“was” rather than “is.” Because she doesn’t know if the man she would have been married to for 47 years come June, the man who has given her four children, a brick house, a gray sedan, and a good life, is really John at all. She thinks that person left. Most of us in town would agree.

He was always a nice man, a kind man, easy with praise and concern about how you and your family are and if you’re still going to church every Sunday. In all their years together (much more than 46—John and Dorothea dated five years before they married), she had never heard him cuss. Three days after that fateful doctor’s visit, John came inside the house and said the damn key wouldn’t fit in the damn ignition of the damn car.

The cussing has grown worse since—horrible words that Dorothea never thought her husband capable of uttering. He’s grown impatient with the world, cursing the neighbors and the government and “the whole damn thing.” Once, he grew violent and pushed Dorothea against the kitchen sink, screaming at her, wanting to know what she’d done with his wife.

Though she remains strong and faithful, Dorothea has said she often wonders why she must sit idly by, watching as what remains of this man’s life slowly slips away. She wonders too how it is that a mass of deformed cells pressing against her husband’s brain can turn him into someone else. In all outward ways, he is still John. It is still his face and his body, the same hairline and mole just below his right ear. And yet he is no longer John. He has become someone else. He has become a stranger.

And Dorothea is left to wonder this: What makes us “us?” What is that quality that defines us and renders us unique? Where does that quality lie? And perhaps most important of all, where does that quality go when it appears to be taken away?

I don’t know the answer to that question. It breaks my heart that John and Dorothea must endure such a thing, and that there are so many others who must endure it as well. It hurts. It’s not fair.

But Dorothea isn’t angry. That’s what has struck me most about her these last months. She’s not mad at John, nor his tumor, nor even the God who doesn’t seem interested in healing them—in bringing her husband back. It’s remarkable to me, though not to her. To Dorothea, the question now isn’t Why. It isn’t How. It’s only What.

“God wants me to take care of him,” she says of the man who used to be John. “That’s all I need to know.”

And so she will, until some near or far-off day when Dorothea will say goodbye to him for now. Only for now. And the faith she has that God will equip her to care for her husband now is the very faith that allows her to know that when they meet again, it will be John she sees. The old John. And he will thank her.

It wasn’t the proximity of the magazine (right there on the table beside me) that caught my eye, it was the title. And since there is little else one can do in a doctor’s waiting room than leaf through germ-riddled periodicals, I did just that.

Real Simple, it read.

Though I’ve since learned it’s quite the popular publication, I had no idea it existed. Did not even know such a subject had been deemed to interesting as to devote an entire magazine to it. My wife has corrected my ignorance on the matter. She said simple is in now. Simple is cool.

Now that I’ve thought about it, I can understand why. It’s a mess out there in the big, wide world. All that shouting and pointing of fingers, all that angst and unease. There was a time not too long ago when most people felt we were all charging headlong into the future, and the future was going to be a wonderful place. No more war, no more hunger, no more want and hurt. Science and technology was going to save us from ourselves.

I think it’s safe to say that’s not really the case anymore. I think a lot of us are beginning to see that we certainly are charging headlong, but the future isn’t as bright as it once was. That our science and technology might help us a great deal, but it also sucks our time and, in the process, maybe a little bit of our souls. Everything seems so complicated, and that same hidden part of us that whispers a random cough might be a building cold is whispering that complicated isn’t good, complicated makes things harder. And the cure for complicated? Simple.

I think of a relative of mine living up in the mountains. A simple man with a simple home. Woodstove for heat, well for water. He doesn’t have much, but he has what he needs and is all the better for it. Sometimes I think riches are best measured not in how much of something we have, but how much of something we can let go of.

Snow is falling just outside my window right now. The smart man on the radio doesn’t really know how much will end up on the roads and grass, only that it will be “measureable.” And even now I can see men and women coming home after a long day with gallons of milk and loaves of bread in their hands. I’ve written before about how and why people turn to the basics when the world bares its teeth. I think the same applies here.

There is much to be said for simplifying things, of cutting back and trimming down. Let’s face it, ours is an imminently blessed nation to call home, and as a result we have an overabundance of stuff we could really do without. And by that, I mean things we possess and things that possess us, things on our outsides and others inside. Because most of us don’t just own a lot, we carry a lot as well.

I’m still on the fence with a resolution for this year. Maybe simplifying my life fits the bill. Maybe instead of getting more, I’ll give more. Maybe instead of hanging on, I’ll let go. Maybe we should all get back to the basics. Maybe getting away from them is the cause of much of the world’s hurts.

Sit Patrick down beside his senior picture in the yearbook, you’d swear he graduated only a couple weeks ago. If I told you the truth, you’d scrunch your brow in one of those looks that says Huh-uh, no way. Then I’d tell you I wasn’t lying, because I’m not—Patrick graduated fifteen years ago.

Still looks like a kid, though. Still has that longish hair boys seem to want to keep now, still engaged in a war of attrition with patches of acne on his cheeks. It’s almost like Patrick slipped into some kind of crack in time way back and has just now found his way out.

But that’s not the case. He’s been around. I’ve seen him.

He still lives at home, though not with his parents. They’ve passed on. It was rough on Patrick just as it would be rough on any of us. His parents left him the house in their will, he’s the owner now, but he still sleeps in his old room and refuses to claim the master bedroom. Patrick’s momma used to tease him whenever he sat on their bed, saying that was the very spot where he was conceived. That thought has never left Patrick’s mind. He says there’s not enough Tide in the world to clean those sheets enough for him to lie there at night.

I guess you could say he has a good life. Steady job, place to live, food on the table. Patrick says he’s free. I suppose he is in some ways. He comes and goes as he wishes and is beholden to none but the Lord, whom he dutifully greets most mornings and every Sunday. He has friends, and though he’ll blush and shrug when you ask him, I have on good notice that women have called on him. That seems to be the one flaw in Patrick’s life, more or less. He’s say that’s true.

He’s seen thirty years come and go. Some people pay little mind to such things and Patrick would count himself among them, but I’m not sure. Whether we pay attention or not to the ticking of that great clock in us all doesn’t really matter I guess, because it ticks on anyway. This moment is both the oldest we’ve ever been and the youngest we’ll ever be from here on out. I think Patrick understands that, even if he’ll never say it.

He likes to talk about how he’s the only one of his friends who’s never been married and divorced. A smile will always come along behind those words, as though he’s happy to say them. Patrick will say he’s not made for matrimony, just like Paul the missionary. Paul was too busy living to settle down. Patrick reckons he’s the same. Besides, he says, why go through all the trouble of loving if it’s just going to fall apart in the end? Why give that best piece of yourself to someone who’s just going to up and move on without you one day? Doesn’t matter if that person ends up on the other side of town (as his friend’s wives have done) or on the other side of the ground (like his parents).

No, doesn’t make much sense going that far. Safer to keep your heart in your own chest, where it belongs. Patrick says that’s why he still looks so young, because he’s still whole and hasn’t given half of himself away. He says it’s easier to go your own way like that. To be free.

Maybe. And on the surface, I suppose he has some good points. But then again, life is never promised to be a safe thing, is it? We may come into this world unscratched, but we leave it with all manner of scars. Risk is worth the pain, I think. That’s how you grow. Trying and failing is better than not trying at all, whether it’s love or a dream. It can hurt (oh, how it can hurt), but I’d still rather look old and haggard than young and untouched by life’s thistles.

The note above was penned by an eighty-five-year-old man named Robert. One day last month, he drove his car down a steep rural road to look at a pond. When he tried to drive back the way he came, the car rolled off the path and became mired in a ravine.

Robert was unable to walk out of his situation due to back problems that left him only able to get around with the help of a walker. He had no food. The only water he had barely filled an 8 ounce bottle. He honked his horn until the car battery was depleted.

Robert sat there, alone in his car, for two days.

With no food, little water, and temperatures in the upper 90s, he realized things didn’t look good. So he grabbed a pen and began writing on the car’s armrest.

Look closely and you can make a bit of it out. The first—and Robert said the most important—was that he make sure everyone knew it was an accident. Robert didn’t want anyone thinking he committed suicide. He wrote that the car’s wheels spun out. He asked that his family give him a closed casket.

About forty hours later, Robert was found. Turns out that final note wasn’t needed after all. As you can imagine, the whole ordeal changed him. Robert has a new outlook on life. He understands its delicateness. He knows every moment is precious.

It’s a good story with a happy ending. But me, I can’t stop thinking about that note.

What would I tell my family? What would I tell you? What would I say if I could never say anything more? Those questions have preyed on my mind since reading Robert’s story. I figured the only way I could start thinking about something else is to go ahead and write my letter.

So here it is, the last thing I’d ever write:

Dear All,

I don’t know how I managed to get myself in this mess. I think a lot of times you can’t see the trouble that’s coming until it’s on you. This is probably one of those times. I guess I should hurry. I never used to think much about time. Suddenly, time seems pretty important.

To my family, I want to say that the very last thing I want to do is leave you behind. You need to know that as much as I’m ready for heaven, I’m thinking the angels will have to drag me there. But don’t worry, I’ll find me a bench somewhere near the gate and wait for each of you.

To my wife, I’m sorry I was never the man I wanted to be. I’m thankful you overlooked that. Take care of the kids. Raise them to believe like you and fight like me.

To my son, there are few things more difficult in life than knowing how to be a man. I’ll give you a quick summary—work hard, laugh much, pray often. Love dignity rather than money. Face your darkness. Let your word be your bond. You’ll do well in life if you cling to those things. Know that I will always be proud of you.

To my daughter, you’ve taught me more about faith than anyone I’ve ever known. Remember this: we seldom have any choice as to the wars we must fight, we can only elect to face them with honor or cowardice.

To my friends, I know it may appear at times that I prefer silence to speech and solitude to company, but you mended the gashes I had rent into my own heart. Whatever goodness is in me was fostered by you.

I ask that you dispose of my remains as you see fit. I have no preference. Whatever flesh and bone is left behind is not me, it is merely an empty house that God has deemed I’ve outgrown.

Do not mourn, laugh.

Do not look back, look forward.

Live intently.

And last, know that all that separates the two of us is but one stroke of heaven’s eternal clock. Life is but a dream. Death is simply when we wake.